April is National Poetry Month so I always think more about poetry this time of year. I was a young, avid reader as a child and read anything I could get my hands on. I wish I could thank the librarian at Academy Park Elementary school for choosing “I Met a Man” by John Ciardi for her library. I don’t know how many times I checked that book out but I loved it and read it over and over.
There were bits and pieces of one poem especially that stayed in my mind all of these years. I Googled one of those pieces and learned that the poem was The Man in the Onion Bed. I remembered the first name of the author (John) because my teacher, Mrs. Staton, told me he had taught at the college she attended.
In my Google search I found the poem and it was the one I remembered. The author was John Ciardi. Ironically, I already had one of his books about poetry (How Does a Poem Mean?)! I went to amazon.com and there I found a copy of I Met a Man! It came with a dust jacket but I took it off when the book arrived and it looks exactly as I remembered it.
It’s very cool to know who was the first poet who turned us on to poetry and if he were alive today I would thank John Ciardi. That’s the power and magic of words, that we can remember them for decades and be inspired by them.
